Apple: A Thunderbolt desktop hub could power all your connections

Apple has detailed to Pocket-lint how its new Thunderbolt port is powerful enough to allow a third-party manufacturer to make a desktop hub that could take a number of ports before being plugged in to the Thunderbolt port on the company’s new MacBook Pro laptops.

In a briefing Holly Shelton, worldwide product marketing manager for Mac hardware at Apple outlined how a desktop hub featuring USB 3.0, a display port socket, FireWire, and even an Ethernet port could be created by a third-party and powered via the new super fast port.

Don't get too excited however, as Apple isn't about to build one themselves, and at the moment there aren’t any Thunderbolt devices on the market, however Lacie with its Lacie Little Big Disk, Western Digital and Promise are all looking at Thunderbolt hard drives in the next couple of months.

Demoing the new tech, our lady from Apple showed us how the new technology was capable of streaming four 1080p uncompressed videos at the same time - an impressive feat, as well as transferring a 5GB file from the hard drive to the computer in around 10 seconds - try and do that at home on your current computer.

Even better, the technology, says Apple, is future proof, so as the technology gets faster - it's roadmapped to 100Gbps but starting at 10Gbps - users won't have to change their laptops; just the Thunderbolt products and cables.

Apple was of course coy about detailing possible future products, but agreed that theoretically a Thunderbolt hub was possible and would be welcomed.

Are we heading to a future of a laptop with just one port? Only time will tell.

Stuart has been a tech journalist since 1998 and written for a number of publications around the world. Regularly turning up on television, radio and in newspapers, Stuart has played with virtually every gadget available.